About Hassan

Hassan Aït-Kaci held a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania (1984), and a Research Director Habilitation from University of Paris 7 (1990) also in CS. He was a member of research staff at MCC in Austin, TX, and at the Digital Paris Research Lab, where he contributed with the LIFE programming language. In 1994, he was appointed full professor at SFU, in Burnaby, BC, Canada, where he held a senior NSERC Industrial Research Chair. In 2000, he joined ILOG, a French multinational company specializing in developing high-performance AI, OR, and Graphics software tools. After ILOG’s acquisition by IBM in February 2009, he was a Senior Member of Technical Staff at IBM Canada. From January 2013 to January 2015, he was the holder of an ANR Chair of Excellence at the Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, heading the CEDAR project (Constraint Event-Driven Automated Reasoning). In 2015, he was in charge of the LivEMUSIC (Living Environment Monitoring Use Scenarios with Intelligent Control) research project. In his previous work, Dr. Aït-Kaci contributed to the formal design and efficient implementation of very high-level and multi-paradigm programming environments (LogIn, LeFun, LIFE), and pioneered the use of constraints for representing and processing knowledge. His latest work is on extending knowledge representation to be used for fuzzy reasoning (deduction and induction) by allowing fuzzy concept similarity to be taken into account through fuzzy constraint solving. His general interests are in both the theory and implementation of knowledge representation, automated reasoning, declarative computing, and (natural and formal) language processing.